ECHA launches the Classification and Labelling Inventory of chemicals on the EU market

Thursday, 16 February 2012

ECHA has launched the Public Classification and Labelling (C&L) Inventory with the information coming from REACH registrations and CLP notifications so far received by the Agency. Over three million submission records covering more than 90,000 chemical substances are now freely accessible from the ECHA website.

Geert Dancet, Executive Director of the European Chemicals Agency encouraged Industry to use the Inventory data as a common ground for discussions...

ECHA has launched the Public Classification and Labelling (C&L) Inventory with the information coming from REACH registrations and CLP notifications so far received by the Agency. Over three million submission records covering more than 90,000 chemical substances are now freely accessible from the ECHA website.

The publication of the Inventory is a key milestone set out in the CLP Regulation and represents a significant step forward towards transparency on the physical, health or environmental hazards of chemical substances. The Inventory provides a wealth of information from Industry on how they have self-classified chemicals and shows how some companies have classified the same substance differently. ECHA claims that it has not filtered or quality checked the information provided.

"With this increased transparency, we are contributing to a more effective communication on the hazardous chemicals to workers and ultimately to consumers" said Geert Dancet, Executive Director of the European Chemicals Agency. He also encouraged Industry to use the Inventory data as a common ground for discussions between companies to reach agreement on the self-classification and labelling of hazardous substances. To provide support for the hazard communication process, ECHA is planning to develop an IT platform to facilitate contacts among notifiers of chemicals to give them the opportunity to discuss reasons for differences and, where appropriate, agree on a uniform classification.